I’m noticing an increasingly scary trend in the church. To put it simply – it goes like this: more and more of God’s people no longer know who they are. For some reason, many in the church believe the Kingdom of God is something that we enter when we die. In reality – we enter into the Kingdom of God the second we start to follow Jesus. Every once in a while, I’ll run into a group of people that can accept that, except then they act like (and believe they are just) peasants in this so called kingdom.

To follow Christ is to step in who God created us to be. Guess what, to follow Christ is to step into sonship (and daughtership). If our father is the King – doesn’t that mean we are princes and princesses? Doesn’t that make us coheirs to the throne? Doesn’t that make us a lot more than just peasants? I’ll let you chew on that for a bit, but for now – I want to take you to the intended point of this post. I was with a group of friends earlier and we were talking about identity (among other things), and the question was asked “Who are you?” I want to share with you how I respond to that question.

I’m not so sure peasant is far off, though maybe a peasant is too highly regarded. Martin Luther, as he was dying, wrote “we are all beggars” He was acknowledging that when we come before the Lord, we bring nothing. All that we have, all that is worth anything, has been given us by the Lord. So, yes, we have been made heirs of the promise, but only insofar as we approach the throne recognizing it is not I, but he who loves and died for me that makes me acceptable before God. In this way, maybe it is less a place of honor than response. In the claiming of the title of “child of God’ , some people consider themselves too good, too high, too righteous for those around them. When as a child of God, you are called to emulate the Son of God who lived his life with the least, the last, and the lost. He lived his life as a beggar , knowing that he was neither constrained nor defined by the world. Just my two cents…